It would be nice if we had robot police who were 100% fair

There's a short SF story about the first town in the USA to have robot police. They have all the Local/State/Federal laws in memory. When they are first turned on, things seem fine. Then, they start pulling in people for trivial things like jaywalking. When the human cops try to intervene, the robot cops arrest them for interfering with an officer... and things go downhill from there. I specifically recall one incident- a robot reports he arrested a female cop for theft of Police property because she "used a paperclip to repair a private lingerie strap".

Well... let's just say the ending involves all the human cops in jail, and the reporter narrator commenting to a friend that it's a toss-up if the Governor will be able to shut the 'bots down, or they will arrest him for corruption first.

The moral of the story- be careful what you ask for, you might get it. Ever taken a paperclip/thumbtack/pen/sheet of paper home from work? To a robot cop, that's theft. And there is no way to add a lower limit without people gaming the system. ("Yes, robot cop, I stole it, but it's $.02 under the limit- you can't arrest me!", etc)

I already mentioned that Google is gearing up to filter all "torrent" and "magnet" links out, thus avoiding any legal responsibility.

Then they'll be called something else. "downpour" and "lodestone", perhaps. And it'll be a few years before the **AA's catch on and force those to me filtered, too. And then we'll move on to 'rain' and
'attraction' links... etc..etc.

It's the circle of life.

Even duplicators need energy to work, and energy costs money.

Only until you realize you can duplicate solar panels and wind turbines.

http://craphound.com/littlebrother/download/

I'd just finished scrap-booking all the clues when the bell rang and we began our escape. I surreptitiously slid the gravel down the side of my short boots -- ankle-high Blundstones from Australia, great for running and climbing, and the easy slip-on/slip-off laceless design makes them convenient at the never-ending metal-detectors that are everywhere now.

We also had to evade physical surveillance, of course, but that gets easier every time they add a new layer of physical snoopery -- all the bells and whistles lull our beloved faculty into a totally false sense of security. We surfed the crowd down the hallways, heading for my favorite side-exit. We were halfway along when Darryl hissed, "Crap! I forgot, I've got a library book in my bag."

"You're kidding me," I said, and hauled him into the next bathroom we passed. Library books are bad news. Every one of them has an arphid -- Radio Frequency ID tag -- glued into its binding, which makes it possible for the librarians to check out the books by waving them over a reader, and lets a library shelf tell you if any of the books on it are out of place.

But it also lets the school track where you are at all times. It was another of those legal loopholes: the courts wouldn't let the schools track us with arphids, but they could track library books, and use the school records to tell them who was likely to be carrying which library book.

I had a little Faraday pouch in my bag -- these are little wallets lined with a mesh of copper wires that effectively block radio energy, silencing arphids. But the pouches were made for neutralizing ID cards and toll-booth transponders, not books like --

"Introduction to Physics?" I groaned. The book was the size of a dictionary. ...
"I'm thinking of majoring in physics when I go to Berkeley," Darryl said. His dad taught at the University of California at Berkeley, which meant he'd get free tuition when he went. And there'd never been any question in Darryl's household about whether he'd go.

"Fine, but couldn't you research it online?"

"My dad said I should read it. Besides, I didn't plan on committing any crimes today."

"Skipping school isn't a crime. It's an infraction. They're totally different."

"What are we going to do, Marcus?"

"Well, I can't hide it, so I'm going to have to nuke it." Killing arphids is a dark art. No merchant wants malicious customers going for a walk around the shop-floor and leaving behind a bunch of lobotomized merchandise that is missing its invisible bar-code, so the manufacturers have refused to implement a "kill signal" that you can radio to an arphid to get it to switch off. You can reprogram arphids with the right box, but I hate doing that to library books. It's not exactly tearing pages out of a book, but it's still bad, since a book with a reprogrammed arphid can't be shelved and can't be found. It just becomes a needle in a haystack.

That left me with only one option: nuking the thing. Literally. 30 seconds in a microwave will do in pretty much every arphid on the market. And because the arphid wouldn't answer at all when D checked it back in at the library, they'd just print a fresh one for it and recode it with the book's catalog info, and it would end up clean and neat back on its shelf.

All we needed was a microwave.

Google 'new london police IQ Jordan'.

http://www.nytimes.com/1999/09/19/weekinreview/ideas-trends-help-wanted-invoking-the-not-too-high-iq-test.html?pagewanted=1
" In 1996 Mr. Jordan scored 33 out of 50 on the exam, ... He says he was curtly informed that he did not ''fit the profile,'' which litigation revealed was a score of 20 to 27.

''Bob Jordan is exactly the type of guy we would want to screen out,'' said William C. Gavitt, the deputy police chief"

How about running a SECURE system at home? simply having the PC with logins and auto lock-out would have stopped this idiot sociopath in his tracks. Yes you can crack the passwords with physical access to the machine but I highly doubt the idiot had enough time to crack it without getting caught.

The article said he had "repeatedly" broken into their home. Plenty of chances to plant a hardware keystroke logged and get their passwords.

Probably because they're very likely to be forced to work together with the minority anyway and know that if they don't, it will make their jobs even harder.

If they stood up and reported (and testified against) the bad cops and got them kicked off the force, they wouldn't have to work together with them. AND they wouldn't have to face moral challenges daily. AND the public would treat them better, resulting in less stress. AND....

And perhaps there is a group sort of between the decent and honest cops and the assholes and the decent and honest ones know that if they break rank, the in-betweens will side with those who don't break it.

As someone else said "If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem".

Actually, I believe it was that a second House could repeal laws with a 1/3 minority. I mean if 1 out of every 3 people doesn't want the law....

That phrase bugs me. It really should be "Two wrongs don't necessarily make a right".

As a simple example, imagine a card game. Say, blackjack. Assuming the cards are reasonably randomized, each player (assume 2 players) has the same chance of winning/losing. This is the way the game should be- this is 'Right'.

If one person does a 'wrong' and marks the cards, they have given themselves an unfair advantage.

If the other person then marks the cards (a 'wrong'), then they have given themselves the same advantage the first player has. This means both players again have the same chance of winning/losing. As as stated above, this is 'Right'.

So, two 'wrongs' can make a 'right'. QED

Did it go 88mph?

::sigh::

(X) Users of email will not put up with it

There is nothing to 'put up with'.

(X) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once

Wrong.

(X) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business

How?

(X) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email,

No need for one.

(X) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical

No one has tried it before, that's true.

(X) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
(X) Sending email should be free

Email Certification meets both these conditions: Users who have certification-complaint email programs would see the benefits, but non-certification-complaint clients would still work perfectly well.
Sending email would still be free. It's just the Certification (only needed for Servers, not users) that would cost a nominal amount.

(X) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.

I think it would. If you disagree, why not post why, instead of an annoying and inaccurate 'form letter'?

Cool. If any of the people they certify send spam, then people will complain to them. If they refuse to stop it, they get their certificates blacklisted, just like there are IP blacklists now.

Once all the Chinese ISP are blacklisted....

That's certainly possible. But it only helps You, not everyone else. Reporting the spam to the certifier means the certificate will get pulled, meaning NO ONE gets that spam. And that's what will result in less/no spam for everyone.

... or if they use Email Certification.

Long story short, everyone who wants to send Certified mail has to be 'certified' by their ISP. (UN-certified mail would still be possible, if you wish.) Getting certified is nothing more than providing enough information to positively identify you, and costs a nominal fee.

In return, you create a public/private key pair, and give the public one to the certifier. The private key goes into your email server, which adds some headers to each outgoing email. One of these is encrypted with the private key. When someone with a certification-compliant email program receives a certified email, the program reads the headers, connects to the certifer's certification server, and downloads the public key. It then uses the public key to decrypt the encrypted header. If successful, it proves that email came from the specified server, and no one else.

If you get spam, your email client has a big 'report certified spam' button. Click it, and an email is auto-launched to the certifier of the sender. The certifier contacts the sender and demands an explanation. If sender was hacked, they fix the security hole and tell certifier they did so. If spam was not spam, or a misunderstanding, they explain.

If, OTOH, the sender does not reply, then the certifier revokes their certification, and from that moment on, all their (the 'sender's) emails are UN-certified.

What if a Certifier themselves is 'evil'? Well, it's certainly possible to have blacklists like they do now, but, instead of blacklisting IP addressed, which get re-assigned and cause trouble for their new owners, it would be evil Certifiers that get listed and blocked.

Eventually, it'll reach a point where any spam that is sent out will get the sender 'de-certified' almost immediately. That means everyone else probably never ends up seeing the spam at all (depending on how their clients handle un-certified emails. Most people will probably auto-trash them.)

However, white lists are still possible. If you like getting emails from a certain un-certified sources, just white-list them, and you'll continue to get them. You can also use challenge-response or keyword set-ups for people sending you un-certified email.

TL;DR:
By proving who send the email (or, more precisely, which server did), Email Certification can hold the server owner responsible. If they send spam, they get de-certified, which means in all likely hood, they lose the ability to email anyone at all. Spammers who can't get certified can't send emails anyone will see.

I also found it rather silly that, while there were only 12 models of human-appearing Cylon, there were at least three "sleepers" on board the Galactica. That might have made sense in the original, where the Galactica was the best ship in the fleet (and Adama was a revered figure). But one of the things I liked best about the new show was that the Galactica was an old ship, the last of the old Battlestars; and Adama was just some stubborn old guy who would be retiring soon. The reason the Galactica escaped the Cylon Trojan Horse was that Adama had successfully resisted all new computer upgrades; and he got away with that because it was an old ship that nobody really cared about.

Hence the need for 'sleepers'. The Cylons could take over the other ships computer networks with little to no problems, but the Galactica didn't have networked computers, so the Cylons needed agents in place.